Earticle

The mountain gods of P’albong Mountain in western Kangwŏn Province are celebrated in a spring shaman ceremony presided over by a master shaman attached to the village shrine. Several studies of the shrine ceremony made between 1976 and 1990 complement each other at the observational level, but differ as to whether the present ceremony is an imperfectly preserved example of an ideal-typical dualistic purakche made up of a male Confucian ritual complemented by female shamanistic ritual, or a living example of a distinct regional tradition that acquires its authenticity from believers’ inner experience and perception. Mountain worship at P’albong Mountain is documented to be old, yet the current shamans’ ritual is “inspired by the gods” rather than handed down from the past. The article argues for the view of tradition as an interpretive process that embodies both continuity and discontinuity, rather than of tradition as replication of the past.

Korean literature is an overdetermined signifier that incorporates multiple states, languages, and communal experiences based on the assumption of a shared ethnicity. As a national literature, its singularity is disrupted by the historically contingent discursive practices of literary formation, an inherently comparative process that is exacerbated in the Korean case by a multilingual past and the existence of two states known to the world as “Korea.” This essay argues that the current conception of Korean literature is a specifically South Korean construction as a component of the national globalization drive (segyehwa) that began as a predominantly economic project in the 1990s, but took hold as a cultural project in the 2000s. I examine a series of literary events from 2000-2012 organized by the Korean Literature Translation Institute (KLTI), a government agency, and the Daesan Foundation, a private cultural institution that brought local and foreign authors, scholars, and representatives from the publishing industry and local governments with the goal of globalizing Korean literature. These conversations reveal the mechanisms that prioritized literature as a desirable marker of cultural capital and its stakes for South Korea’s claim on Korean culture on the world stage. I show how South Korea’s targeted approach to the contested category of world literature through its own newly developed cultural institutions exposed the fundamental hierarchy of cultural capital based on developmental status that determines inclusion/exclusion in world literature.

Auto-ethnographies tracing the fieldwork encounters of anthropologists have become integral to understand the processes of the ethnographic endeavor. In ethnomusicology, ethnographic methodology remains the sine qua non distinguishing our work from that of the musicologist. The field is ubiquitous in our work as the space within which we accumulate the experiences informing our analyses. Equally ubiquitous is the assumption that the field exists outside of our ‘real lives’ (Rasmussen 2004). Yet, with transcultural professional lives becoming increasingly common, and more scholars establishing professional roots in locations formerly allocated as ‘the field,’ there exists an obvious need for a reconsideration of and new fluidity in ethnographic research. If “fieldwork is, in reality, just living” (Reed 2003), then this way of life deserves a consideration in all its complexities, diving into the interstices of personal, professional, and artistic identities. In this article, I explore the overlapping and ephemeral spaces of the ethnographic self in the Korean context. Drawing on my own experiences as a non-Korean researcher of Korean music and professor in a department of Korean music, the paper inescapably takes the form of auto-ethnography. The article uncovers the ways by which the performance-based practice of bi-musicality complicates the identity of the researcher, as the ability to perform on an instrument tied to notions notations of race-based nationalism transforms the scholar into a curiosity. Through an analysis of my own bimusical practice, I scrutinize the benefits and pitfalls of the constant presence of the foreign researcher in the Korean academic and social milieu.

In the past two decades, Korean Studies has expanded to become an interdisciplinary and increasingly international field of study and research. While new undergraduate Korean Studies programs are opening at universities in the Republic of Korea (ROK) and intensifying multi-lateral knowledge transfers, this process also reveals the lack of a clear identity that continues to haunt the field. In this autoethnographic essay, I examine the possibilities and limitations of framing Korea as an object of study for diverse student audiences, looking towards potential futures for the field. I focus on 1) the struggle to escape the nation-state boundaries implied in the habitual terminology, particularly when teaching in the ROK, where the country is unmarked (“Han’guk”), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is marked (“Pukhan”), and the diaspora is rarely mentioned at all; 2) the implications of the expansion of Korean Studies as a major within the ROK; 3) in-class navigations of Korean national pride, the trap of Korean uniqueness and (self-)orientalization and attitudes toward the West; 4) the negotiation of my own status as a white American researching/teaching about Korea, often to Koreans; 5) reactions to the (legitimate) demands of undergraduate Korean Studies majors to define the field and its future employment opportunities. Finally, I raise some questions about teaching methodologies in Korean Studies. Drawing on my experiences with diverse groups of students, I ask those involved in this field to consider with me the challenges emerging in a time of rapid growth.

Stone steles served multiple purposes in different cultures: as a territorial marker, an edifying tablet, a political edict, a votive altar, a funerary monument, or a celebratory reminder of remarkable individuals or events. Chinese steles carved with images of Buddhist deities are monuments that testify to the process of adoption and adaptation across different cultural traditions. As products of the Buddhist appropriation of non-Buddhist Chinese steles, steles with Buddhist imagery are hybrids. The visual dialogue between two realms—the mortuary and the religious— underwent another twist when Buddhist steles first appeared on the Korean peninsula in the seventh century. The carvings on Korean steles displayed the usual prominent Buddhist deities and the formulaic language of a dedicatory inscription, but were made in the former territory of a defeated kingdom under a new administrative reign. Hence, they tell us about the fluctuating boundary between political entities, the social identity of the donors, and desired destinations of the devotees. Although “set in stone,” they never easily manifest a single fixed reading of the visual messages embedded in them. In order to better understand the paradoxically fluid character of unyielding stone, this article discusses some anomalous elements of these steles. Focusing on a few peculiar examples of steles from 6th century China and 7th century Korea, this article explores the roles of subsidiary motifs, such as trees and pavilions, found across geographic/cultural borders.

Founded upon the Confucian moral principles of loyalty, filiality, and fidelity, the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) promoted these principles as a crucial means of maintaining the social and ethical order in society. In dealing with numerous incidents of filial crimes, however, the Chosŏn state had to strike a balance between morality and law, constantly debating the appropriate circumstances and degree of exoneration for filial avengers. From a legal perspective, vengeful crimes committed under the flag of virtue could not automatically be sanctioned, for this would generate further retaliation and eventually lead to chaos. In the case of a married daughter’s filial vengeance, in particular, judgment was even more complex because her devotion to her natal parents was expected to be subordinate to the higher virtue of marital fidelity under the intensifying Confucian model of patriarchy and patrilineality during the latter part of the dynasty. Centering on an eighteenth-century crime committed by a married woman to avenge her father’s death, this article reconsiders the complex nature of married women’s filial piety toward their natal parents, which complicated the orthodox boundaries of their natal relations as prescribed by the Confucian state. This article also explicates the cultural and legal underpinnings of filial vengeance in late Chosŏn society, as demonstrated by the verdicts for such acts of violence situated within one of the most contested cultural and legal realms in eighteenth-century Korea.

Originally, East Asian intellectuals focused their attention on the philosophy of the Confucian Classics, rarely commenting on their literary aspects. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, there were three exegetical works that proposed a different approach to the Mengzi: Maengja ch’aŭi (Notes on the meanings of the Mengzi) written by Wi Paekkyu (1727– 1798), a Chosŏn scholar, Mengzi lunwen written by Niu Yunzhen (1706– 1758) from China, and Doku Mōshi written by Hirose Tansō (1782–1856) in Japan. These exegeses approached the Mengzi through its literary style, and commented on many literary points: rhetorical strategy, grammar, and wording. In this article, these exegetical works are referred to as “rhetorical commentaries” since they emphasized rhetoric to a much greater extent than previous commentaries. The purpose of this article is to show how the rhetorical commentaries are different from ordinary or standard commentaries, such as the works of Zhu Xi and Jiao Xun, but also to point out some differences among the three rhetorical commentaries. In addition, this study evaluates the significance of the appearance in East Asia of rhetorical commentaries in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This will be done by placing them in the context of relevant historical events and changes in literati culture from the middle ages to the early-modern period of East Asia. Thus, this article will be a first step towards an understanding of rhetorically oriented exegeses in East Asia and the relationship between these commentaries, their historical change and their intellectual history.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern historians played a vital role in structuring discourses about Korean nationhood. These new narratives were not created in isolation but interwoven with the international environment in which different forces co-created representations of Korea. This article attempts to reconsider the formation of modern Korean historiography by examining how Korean nationalist and Japanese colonialist scholars overlapped with each other in their practice of writing national history. It shows that Korean and Japanese historical accounts, despite their differences, were both premised on three major categorical concepts derived from the West: the essentialist understanding of the nation, the linear perception of time, and history’s subjective control over territorial space. I will conduct a textual analysis of writings by two Korean historians— Sin Ch’aeho and Pak Ŭnsik—and compare them to publications by several Japanese scholars who worked under the sponsorship of the Government General from the 1910s to the 1930s. My goal is to show that these two types of historical interpretation reified themselves for political ends within regimes of Western epistemological paradigms.

This article describes the generational perspectives revealed in the views of three Korean poets, representing three generations of poetic circles, through their appropriations of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who experienced colonial rule as they did. Within the history of modern Korean poetry, Kim Ŏk (b. 1896) stands as a representative of the 1920s, Kim Kirim (b. 1908) of the 1930s, and Kim Suyŏng (1921–1968) of the postcolonial years, especially the 1960s. Though different in their styles and perspectives, they shared the roles of poet, literary critic, and translator and were flagship figures in their respective eras. Looking into the works and poetics of these three poets is tantamount to exploring the history of modern Korean poetry spanning the period between the 1920s and 1960s. Drawing on the fact that all three poets were interested in translating and interpreting Yeats, this article aims to trace the genealogy of Korean modernist poetry by exploring the generational differences in their views on poetry through their mediation of Yeats.

Yi Tal (1539–1612), whose literary name is Son’gok, is regarded as a representative poet of the mid-Chosŏn period. As an illegitimate son of a yangban, despite his talent and education, Yi suffered state-sanctioned injustices like other members of his class. He had a brief career as an Education Official (hakgwan) in the Translation Office (Sayŏg’won) and served as a Diplomatic Attendant (chongsagwan) tasked with composing poems during an official visit by a Ming envoy. Yi was a nonconformist and he lived and died as a wandering poet. As a poet, he aspired to High Tang poetry, especially the poetry of the Tang poet Du Fu. Influences from Du’s poetry are noticeable in the themes and styles of Yi’s poetic works, in particular in their shared autobiographical approach to poetry. Yi’s literary talents were recognized by contemporary writers. He befriended yangban poets Ch’oe Kyŏngch’ang (1539–1583) and Paek Kwanghun (1537–1582), and the three were called the “Three Tang poets” in their literary circle. As a group, they were highly critical of the Song style of poetry and advocated for a revival of High Tang poetry. Yi taught poetry to Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618) and Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn (1563–1589), the sibling literary icons of the sixteenth century. After Yi’s death, his poems were collected and published by Hŏ Kyun under the title Son’gok chip [The collected works of Sŏn’gok] in 1618. Yi’s poems contain sensitive and candid portrayals of life of a wandering poet, the misery of poverty, the devastation caused by the Japanese invasion of Korea, the comfort of friendship, and the simple joys of life.